The electronic marketplace is increasingly becoming a global enterprise. That is, buyers and sellers may exist anywhere in the world for any given transaction. There is a desire to make a particular geographical location of the buyer or seller irrelevant to any given electronic transaction.
However, there are still a variety of practical impediments to seamless international electronic commerce. For example, buyers may often have a variety of different funding sources, such that any given funding source by itself may lack the necessary balance to complete any given transaction. As another example, which is more particularly related to geographic location, a buyer may have funds in a foreign currency that is not accepted or desired by a given seller.
Consider a seller located in the United States that conducts a transaction with a buyer located in Great Britain, the seller may not be capable of processing currency associated with the British Pound and may desire to transact only in United States Dollars. Yet, the buyer may not have any automated mechanism to transact with the seller in dollars. A situation such as this creates a bottleneck in international electronic commerce, since the buyers and sellers may actively avoid one another in this scenario. Thus, the marketplace for each participant to the transaction has been unnecessarily restricted due to governmental and political limitations associated with currency denominations that manifest themselves based on the particular geographical locations of the buyers and the sellers.
One technique that may be deployed to resolve this problem is to use a credit card for purposes of conducting a cross currency transaction. For instance, if a credit card is accepted in both the selling and buying countries, then such a transaction as described above may proceed. The bank associated with the credit card will perform the currency conversion when the funds are transferred or at any other point during a month or billing cycle associated with the credit card that has been agreed to by the parties that accept the credit card.
However, a buyer may not have all the necessary funds on the credit card to complete the transaction. That is, the buyer may have a positive balance in a bank account or other funding source that the buyer desires to use to complete the transaction. If this is the case, then the use of credit card does not alleviate the problem associated with conversion between currencies. It may also be that the seller is not equipped to accept the credit card being supplied by the buyer or, which may be the case more frequently, the seller does not desire to accept a credit card being offered by the seller, since that particular credit card carries undesirable fees to the seller.
Thus, there needs to be more seamless techniques for promoting international electronic commerce that provides for multiple funding sources and a variety of currency options to both the buyers and the sellers. Additionally, from the seller's perspective the processing associated with being capable of accepting a variety of currencies and funding sources should be transparent to the seller, such that the seller becomes an international merchant with little to no additional effort.